Helms' son Dennis recently donated the 67-year-old note to the CIA Museum, which has placed it online. Here's what Helms—who would go on to run the CIA under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, overseeing some of the agency's most spectacular acts of criminality before being convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to testify about his engineering of a coup in Chile—had to say to his three-year-old boy:

Dear Dennis,

The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe—three short years ago when you were born. Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins. He had a thirst for power, a low opinion of man as an individual, and a fear of intellectual honesty. He was a force for evil in the world. His passing, his defeat—a boon to mankind. But thousands died that it might be so. The price for ridding society of bad is always high.